I really like this girl so I want to help her. In the beginning our relationship was pretty good but I saw signs of some social skills problems. I thought she was just a little socially immature but I chalked that up to other reasons and felt maybe she could improve.
As she got more comfortable with me she actually got significantly worse. I thought she just was naturally not liking me and we weren't compatible but I soon realized she literally hit nearly all the symptoms of autism and not a little, to the max. I would bet my life on her being autistic so I'm not looking for anyone to cast doubt on my diagnosis. She's just good at hiding it as best she can and frankly, I had no prior experience with autism so I wasn't really trained to catch the signs. I don't think her parents are aware either (for various reasons) and she can't keep friends long enough for them to truly understand. I might be the only one with enough perspective to diagnose it. I asked her if she would be willing to go to a psychologist to help with her anxiety issues but she refused because she's scared of them.
Any advice on how to bring this up to her? I'm thinking maybe just tell the mom but I'm not sure the mom will believe me or do anything about it. The dad would be worse.
I was about to just call it quits on our relationship because it's def not working but I do think if she accepts she has autism and works with me it could potentially work. She's given 0 indication she thinks she has autism and she works in social work with disabled people and had training on autism so I suspect she's potentially in denial or scared of accepting it.
Looking for some advice.
Ok for starters, good news, it's likely not autism actually. Epilepsy can create a pragmatic disorder that resembles autism in many ways and is often confused for it, but it isn't autism. It can cause a sort of pseudo-autism that doesn't have one clear label (yet) but if you look up 'epilepsy+induced+pragmatic+disorder+social+communication' or something you'll find what I mean. While on the surface they look very similar, the epileptics are far easier to work with usually, with better outcomes and more of a calmer general helplessness needing regular encouragement. Not about absolutely everything of course, they can believe they are right about stuff (with no insight) and be insistent sure, but there's a generally less confrontational style to them, as compared to a true autist. You also get better masked word-finding difficulties, more severe than the mild autist's, but remarkably well masked. And a range of other language and social/pragmatic issues too...
I'll stop there. Go see a professional in your area if she wants to. Could be either/or neither, or both, that's always possible. But given the other possibilities I'd just ease up on trying to give her that first diagnosis for now, particularly given how stigmatised it is, and given that you might be barking up the entirely wrong tree, there is this big other thing that epilepsy causes and is worth investigating for anyone with those concerns that people are often far more willing to consider and investigate. What you wanna do though, is make sure the speech pathologist is aware of that epilepsy-induced possibility, if she wants to work on her language and communication, rather than them barking up that autism tree too, which a new speech path or just one without much experience with epilepsy might do.
Might wanna be more careful in future with that.
Nah, that's fine. I just wanted to avoid turning the topic into 50 people arguing about what her true condition is unless someone truly knew. I mainly wanted to know the best steps to take to best get her some help in a way she'd be ok with. I'll look into the pragmatic disorder.
Edit - I looked into it and I don't think this is it. Autism still seems more likely than this. Of course, I'm not an expert and there are some things that have merit in this and others that don't. In any case she's got some form of brain damage likely tied at least in part to the epilepsy that's showing as autism causing negative impacts in her day-to-day life and isn't fully aware of it or its extent of the way it's impacting things in her life.